by Edward Humes
It was another of those Bakersfield moments for Laura. Almost eighty degrees, and Penninger’s words made her shiver.
And this only intensified another problem Laura had to deal with in this case. Contrary to the bulk of her cases, in which the evidence proving her clients’ guilt left little room for doubt, she had come to the decision that Pat Dunn was an innocent man. Which wasn’t to say she thought he was a terrific guy. In fact, he was a very odd man, quirky and difficult one moment, self-effacing and kind the next, then just as likely to turn selfish, arrogant and overconfident. He had screwed himself royally, him and his brother Mike, by tipping his first lawyer’s hand to Detective Soliz. It had blown up in their faces, Laura knew—Jerry Coble was still the prosecution’s star witness, and now he was ready for them. Meanwhile, Pat was beside himself, writing endless notes and commentaries and letters about the case, deluging both his lawyers and the investigators, making collect calls whenever his jailers would permit it, driving everyone nuts. He had to be counseled repeatedly not to tell his story to fellow inmates, any one of whom could gladly turn state’s evidence and get in line behind Coble as a prosecution informant given the chance. “Sometimes, I just have to talk to someone, and I don’t care anymore,” Pat had lamented. Yet, despite it all, Laura had come to like Pat Dunn, to appreciate his sense of humor and his own brand of cranky toughness.
After studying the Murder Book, after concluding that the police selectively chose who and what to believe, and after talking with Marie Gates, Laura felt certain that whatever else he might be, Pat Dunn was no killer. This no doubt would make Pat happy, but not so his private investigator. She knew, just as every good defense lawyer knows, that believing in the innocence of a client makes things harder, ratcheting up the pressure and the stress, interfering with the cold and rational assessments necessary to win a case. By believing in Dunn’s innocence, Laura had to find a way to win. Nothing else would be acceptable.
“Problem is,” her husband, Wayne, had reminded her in his eternally blunt way just before she left for Bakersfield, “your side usually loses.”
• • •
Laura returned to her motel room and began thumbing through the police reports, drawn once again back to the Murder Book and to the question of why the sheriff, and now the district attorney, so single-mindedly pursued Pat Dunn as the one and only suspect. Not even the complete absence of any physical evidence deterred those suspicions. When search after search of the Dunn home and cars came up empty, it slowed the authorities down, of course—they couldn’t arrest him without any evidence. But they never turned their suspicions elsewhere. It puzzled Laura, convinced her something more was at work in this case. Here was a woman reported missing, with a documented history of walking at three and four in the morning through a rough area of town, sometimes wearing expensive jewelry, whose habits were utterly predictable and who easily could have been stalked and kidnapped by anyone hanging around the shopping center at night. Here was a woman who had not just been stabbed, but carved up, with tissue excised from her rectum—a gruesome touch the police had not even attempted to explain. Here was a woman whose own court testimony had put her first husband’s embezzling bookkeeper behind bars—a bookkeeper who reasonably could be expected to harbor bitterness toward Sandy, and who was now out of prison. And here was a woman who had just told her financial planner she not only wanted her husband to have more control over their money, but she also wanted to cut off from any inheritance her own sister and all of Pat Dunn’s children. Furthermore, Laura had learned that several workmen making repairs on offices at Sandy’s College Center mall late at night and early in the morning were drug abusers with criminal records—and friends of Danny Dunn, Pat’s troubled middle child. Sandy would have walked right by them on the night she disappeared if she stuck to her normal route.
In Laura’s view, it should not have required much imagination for the sheriff’s department to figure out an alternative and just as likely solution for their case: Take one middle-aged woman, walking alone at night in a high-crime area. Add her unwavering habits over a period of months. Then factor in the possibility she was slipping mentally. She might as well have had a target mounted on her back, as far as Laura was concerned: She was ripe for robbery, abduction or worse at the hands of the unsavory characters working in the mall, or someone else with an old grudge, or any passing stranger with a hunger for money or violence who spied an easy victim.
No one could say any of these alternative theories was accurate, but to Laura that was the point. Each of these potential avenues of suspicion—any one of which could have pointed to possible motives and killers having nothing to do with Pat Dunn—had been ignored by sheriff’s detectives from the start. Such alternatives had not received even cursory attention. They might all be blind alleys, certainly, but no one had bothered to check them out. From the moment the case began, thanks to Kate Rosenlieb’s passionate complaints about Pat and the sheriff’s own initial theories on the case, the focus had been in one direction only.
They wanted Pat Dunn. Period.
Detective Soliz made no bones about it. There had never been any other suspects, he would later explain. He had never felt a need to find any. As far as he and his department were concerned, everything pointed to husband murdering wife. It had been obvious within a matter of days. Had Soliz learned anything that pointed his investigation of Sandy’s death toward another theory, he would have pursued it happily. But that, the detective would say, never happened.20
Laura Lawhon had another view. She knew some, though certainly not all, police investigators formulate their theory of a case early on, then pursue only the leads that support that theory. Once the path is chosen, the case takes on a momentum all its own. There have been instances where evidence, and even confessions, have been ignored because they implicated the “wrong” suspect.21 Erroneous convictions in Kern County as well as elsewhere have resulted from just such a predetermined investigative path. Laura felt certain that the Dunn case fit this model perfectly.
A prime example of this tunnel vision, Laura decided, lay in the treatment of another key witness, a young woman named Ann Kidder. Kidder worked for a Bakersfield accountant, Rick Williams, who handled a number of Sandy’s accounts and businesses. Kidder, an experienced secretary, took pride in her job, in her ability to run an office and, especially, in her ability to remember the names of clients, both in person and on the phone. “I’m a people person,” she said. “And I feel like I have a particular gift for recognizing faces and voices.”
Kidder never met Sandy in person, just spoke to her on the phone a number of times, primarily in June 1992, scheduling appointments or putting her through to Rick Williams so she could speak directly with her accountant. On most occasions, Kidder recalled, Sandy had a confident, professional-sounding voice, distinctive and slightly accented from her New York origins. As Kidder explained to the authorities early on in the case, Sandy had called on June 29 to cancel an appointment that same day—the day before she disappeared. The appointment was rescheduled for July 1, the day after she vanished. Sandy even gave directions to her house, so Williams could go there for the appointment, rather than conduct it in his office.
On July 1, Sandy called again, around half past nine in the morning, Kidder recalled. She wanted to reschedule the appointment once more, this time for July 6. Ann Kidder immediately recognized the voice as Sandy’s, but its normal tone of businesslike confidence was gone. Sandy seemed stressed out, upset, even babbling, as Kidder remembered it. “The Indians are coming down out of the mountains and my husband needs to talk with them,” Sandy gibbered. Then she complained, “My husband doesn’t like to wear clothes.”
As Kidder recalled, Sandy rambled on for a time about these two subjects, the Indians and her husband’s dislike of clothing, but Kidder eventually managed to get the appointment rescheduled and to bid Sandy farewell. The secretary then told her boss about the call, and she logged the change in each of their ap
pointment calendars.
Laura knew Detectives Kline and Soliz had interviewed Kidder several times. They had her show them the appointment books, including the pages where she had erased and replaced the meeting times. Ann Kidder was absolutely certain she had spoken to Sandy that day, and both she and her boss were sure of the date—Sandy had called on the morning of July 1, the day of the appointment.
But that call would have been made twelve hours after Pat had woken up and found his wife missing. In the early stages of the sheriff’s investigation, this conflict in times and dates was deemed one of the most glaring discrepancies in Pat’s story, creating a “cloud of suspicion which indicated foul play,” as Detective Soliz wrote in his first report on the case. The detectives sensed immediately that Ann Kidder would be an important witness against Pat Dunn, even though it was Pat who first led police to her doorstep. The detectives never would have talked to Kidder but for Pat’s suggestion. It seems Rick Williams had arrived as scheduled for his July 6 meeting with Sandy, which Pat seemed to know nothing about. When Williams found out Sandy was missing, he told Pat what Kidder had said about the odd, babbling call on July 1. Pat immediately called Detective Kline to pass on the new information. “I just don’t know what to think anymore,” Pat said at the time. But Kline and Soliz knew what to think: that they had just unearthed some good dirt on Pat Dunn.
Yet a month later, Laura saw, everything changed. That’s when Jerry Coble came forward and described seeing a body hauled out of the Dunn home at one in the morning on July 1, eight hours before Ann Kidder’s conversation with Sandy. Suddenly, a witness the detectives initially found so credible when she seemed to incriminate Pat couldn’t be believed anymore. After Coble’s entrance in the case, detectives returned to interview Kidder again, but this time to ask her questions never posed during previous interviews: How she could be so sure it was Sandy she talked to? Couldn’t she be mistaken? Maybe she was distracted when the call came in, confused about who it was from? Could the caller have been an impersonator?
To Kidder, it seemed clear that the sheriff’s department no longer believed her.22 Laura knew the secretary was right: For now, Kidder provided an alibi for Pat Dunn rather than a nail in the case against him. She swore that she spoke to a murder victim long after the murder supposedly occurred, which would mean Coble lied and Pat was innocent. Nothing had changed to cause detectives to doubt her, other than the sudden revelations from Coble. Which meant the sheriff’s department was confronted with two choices: Believe Ann Kidder, who had no criminal record, no ax to grind, no reason to lie, and who had office calendars and her boss to back up her recollections; or believe Jerry Coble, a career criminal facing six years behind bars, who had begged to cut a deal so he could incriminate someone else, and who offered nothing but his good word to support his story—unable to provide even a last name or phone number for his drug connection “Ray,” whom he had supposedly met just before glimpsing Pat cart off Sandy’s corpse.
In short, it came down to believing in Ann Kidder and Pat Dunn’s innocence or Jerry Coble and Pat Dunn’s guilt. The sheriff’s department chose Jerry Coble.
Laura found it hard to understand how such a choice could be made, even in the most aggressive of sheriff’s departments and DA’s offices. At the courthouse one day, she ran into her fellow private investigator Susan Penninger and told her about Coble, Kidder and the sheriff department’s single-minded pursuit of Pat as their suspect. “Is it just Pat Dunn?” she wondered. “Or is there something else going on here?”
Laura had not really expected an answer to her musings, but Penninger gave one, returning to a subject she had hinted at in previous conversations. “It’s definitely not just Dunn,” she said. “I’ve had two innocent men in prison right now. One I can’t help. The other, I’m still working on. This is Bakersfield, after all.”
Laura looked at the other investigator, raising her eyebrows in question at the bitterness in Penninger’s voice. She was surprised to hear a Bakersfield native voice such thoughts. Penninger, a short, slim woman with a round face that looked youthful from a distance but careworn up close, went on to tell Laura that she had lived all but a few years of her life in Kern County. She had worked for years as a probation officer—she was law enforcement then—before moving to the public defender’s office and, after that, private investigating. Penninger had seen the Witch Hunt play itself out, at first believing the monstrous charges, then gradually concluding that innocent families had been sacrificed to appease public hysteria and an investigation run wild. She knew Bakersfield’s justice system from all sides, and she described it as one that had devolved into isolated camps, with each faction regarding the other as the enemy in a way that seemed unique in its extremity. Unlike the San Francisco Bay area and other places she had worked, the boundary between personal and professional had evaporated in Bakersfield. Since she had become a defense investigator, the social workers and cops she had known and worked with as a probation officer had not only become her professional adversaries, they stopped talking to her entirely. Friends of ten years, people she had gone on cruises with, vacationed with, looked right through her without a word, passing her in the courthouse hallway as if she wasn’t there. She had lost all credibility with them—simply because she dared to question the authorities of Kern County, to raise the possibility that their every utterance in a police report or courtroom might not be 100 percent accurate.
“Let me tell you about my heartbreak case.” Penninger looked at Laura. Every private investigator had such a case if they’ve been at it long enough—the man or woman they believed to be innocent, but still couldn’t save. Penninger’s was named Carl Hogan. She had worked his case five years earlier, but it still haunted her. Hogan, a soft-spoken man, seemingly gentle and shy, had ended up with a life sentence for a fatal sledgehammer attack on a seven-year-old boy and his mother, a savage, senseless crime. Hogan had been the obvious suspect from the start, found standing over the bodies, the bloody hammer in his hand. He swore he had simply stumbled on the victims, the wife and son of a friend he had gone to visit, and had slipped into shock at the sight. But the police did not believe this. They felt sure Hogan was the killer.
Penninger believed otherwise, certain that the authorities, in their zeal to nail Hogan, had overlooked evidence contradicting their theory, while manufacturing major pieces of evidence against him. Even the California Supreme Court seemed to agree: Hogan’s initial conviction and death sentence had been reversed after it was revealed that sheriff’s investigators, in marathon interrogations, had convinced their dazed and frightened suspect that he was mentally ill, that witnesses had seen him commit the murders (a lie designed to encourage his belief that he was losing his mind), and that they would get him psychiatric help if only he would confess. It was the sort of bare-knuckled interrogation detectives had tried on Pat Dunn, but with Hogan, it worked. He finally broke down and confessed, saying if witnesses saw him do it, then he really must have done it. This confession, of course, was not used to get him “help”; it was used by prosecutors to secure his death sentence. But the state supreme court found his tearful confession both coerced and unbelievable, and ordered a new trial even as Ed Jagels railed about liberal judges frustrating justice.23
For his retrial, Penninger helped build a defense that accounted for Hogan’s every movement on the day of the murders, showing, she believed, that he could not possibly have had the time to kill anyone. Hogan could have been in the house only a few seconds before his friend walked in and found him standing over the bodies, she told Laura. But that was not enough: She had not been able to persuade judge and jury of Hogan’s innocence. It was one of Susan Penninger’s greatest sorrows.
“So he’s still in prison?” Laura asked, fascinated yet chilled by the story. She couldn’t know if Hogan was guilty or innocent, but she did know jailhouse snitches were notorious for their embellishments.
Penninger shook her head. She had stayed in touch with Hogan
and his family over the years, and had just gotten a nationally renowned minister and private investigator, James McCloskey, interested in the case. McCloskey’s Centurion Ministries had become famous for proving convicted murderers innocent and winning their releases. But before the minister could get started, Carl Hogan died in prison of heart disease.
“And now I’ve got another one, just as bad, just as innocent,” Penninger said, eyes closed. “Except this one’s not over yet—the appeals are just starting. But if you really want a preview of Pat Dunn’s case, take a look at this one. Take a look at Offord Rollins.”
6
LAURA DID TAKE A LOOK AT THE CASE OF THE PEOPLE of Kern County vs. Offord Rollins, and what she saw left her stricken. It convinced her that Pat Dunn’s case was not at all unique in Bakersfield, for it seemed Rollins had been pursued with the same single-minded focus that made Pat a homicide suspect from day one, that same settling on a theory of the case from the outset, with facts forced to fit theory rather than the reverse. To Laura’s thinking, if Offord Rollins, a good student, high school president and Olympic-caliber athlete, could be convicted on the paltry and contradictory evidence assembled against him, then Pat Dunn’s chances might not be nearly as good as she and his lawyers had hoped.
The Rollins case had been another victory for the same Kern County Sheriff’s Department homicide unit that secured Pat’s arrest. It began on a smoky August evening eleven months before Alexandra Dunn vanished, when a teenager named Sandy Ornelas came charging up a scrubby embankment near the interstate, arms wind-milling crazily, fear plowing such deep furrows into his sixteen-year-old face that his friends could see with perfect clarity, even through their haze of six-packs and wine coolers, just what he would look like at age forty.
